Making Money from Website Search Biznology Webinar with Mike Moran
In this 30‑minute Biznology webinar, Mike Moran explains why most corporate website search engines perform poorly and how that directly hurts revenue. He contrasts site search with Google, showing that the same technology works better on the open web because it has far more signals (links, social activity, traffic data, human raters). On a single site, the lack of these signals makes ranking difficult, leading to common failures such as no‑result, no‑click, and no‑conversion searches. Moran walks through diagnostic metrics (bounce rate after search, conversion rate after search, no‑result queries) and then presents two practical remediation strategies: the “Top‑40” approach (optimizing the most frequent queries) and the “Long‑Tail” approach (handling the many one‑off queries). He describes concrete tactics—identifying landing pages, adding missing content, using “best bets” (hand‑curated results), faceted drill‑down, tuning ranking algorithms, and A/B testing (including testing direct‑to‑page redirects versus a results list). He also addresses private/intranet content security, and stresses that improving site search can capture revenue that would otherwise be lost because visitors already on the site are more likely to convert. The session ends with a brief Q&A covering private content leakage, SEO vs. site search, and the risks of bypassing a results page.
Chapters
Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Chris Abraham, one of the bloggers at Biznology. I'm Director of Social Media at Unison Agency, an integrated brand agency combining strategic, creative, and technology services to help our clients build and strengthen our brands. I focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement, and internet crisis response. I'm also founder and principal of Garrus Digital, a full-service digital strategy consulting firm. Today you'll be hearing from Mike Moran, who will present Making Money from Website Search. But before we do, we need to recognize our sponsors. BarnRaisers, a digital marketing and social media solutions company that builds brands using community and proven principles of relationship marketing. Brick Marketing, full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors. Cxense, a SaaS solution for providing extraordinary insight and control of the digital value chain to increase digital content consumption and accelerate online ad and subscription revenue growth at cxense.com.
That's CXENSE.com.
Marketing Pilgrim, the internet and social media marketing news blog. We cut through the bull so you don't have to. And Unisim, the unagency, your secret weapon to the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. As we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and we'll email you that link later this week. During our speaker's presentation, you can go to your GoToWebinar controls to ask a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your webinar controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event and press the Send button. I will select a few questions at the very end of our webinar and pose them to Mike. While we're waiting for a few last attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology newsletter and blog are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up right now. Okay, thanks again to all of you spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Mike Moran is the founder of the Biznology blog, a well-known expert in all things digital marketing, and a senior strategist at Converzium, a leading social consultancy. Mike is the co-author of Search Engine Marketing Inc. and the sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly. Mike is a veteran of IBM, managing groups in IBM.com for managing groups in IBM.com for 8 years, retiring from IBM in 2008 as a distinguished engineer. So if you've ever struggled with improving your website search, this is the webinar for you. Mike, take it away.
Thanks so much, Chris. What we'd like to talk about today is website search. Now, many of you are familiar with SEO and other types of search optimization that you might do when you're trying to get good rankings in Google and other search engines like Bing. But what we want to talk about today is how you can get good search results in your own search engine. So look at the example here. I could have picked an awful lot of companies, because many companies have poor results in website search. But here's one I picked from the State Farm site. Where if you look for, say, good student discount form, which is a fairly common search that people would do in the auto insurance business because they have teenagers who are getting a discount if they can show that their report card has A's on it, for example. And so they are looking for that form. They have to submit it. How would they find it? It is not something that would be in the navigation of your site. Even if you clicked over to the auto insurance area of the site, you're probably not going to find a link to this that's very high up in the navigation. So how do you find it? Well, you turn to website search. And when you do, you're disappointed. Those are the first 2 results on the screen, because I didn't have room to show you all the results on the screen. But had I shown you all the results, you wouldn't have seen any that were any good anyway. And now why does this happen? Why does this happen on your website? Because the truth is that it happens on most websites. Most websites do not have a good website search. In fact, I've had people derisively refer to website search as a random webpage generator because it so frequently puts up results that don't make any sense. I mean, look at the results here. I mean, these things have nothing to do— none of them are forms. None of them are about good students that we could tell. And so the thing that— so you're really kind of wondering, what is it that we would have to do to make this happen? And we see how Google works. We see that it works really well. And so we must conclude from this that, hey, it's the search engine. Our search engine is just all screwed up. Why do we have such a terrible search engine on our site? But you have to ask yourself, is it really the search engine that's the problem? Now, is it possible the search engine is the problem? Yes, it's possible. But I know a lot of companies that even use Google as their search engine. So they are using the same search engine. They are still not getting good results. And so then what could the questions be that you need to ask yourself? What are the things that could be going wrong that are outside of the search engine? Well, there's a few. One of the first ones is that the right answer actually isn't even on your site. I don't know this for sure, but it's possible that State Farm doesn't even have a page that talks about the student discount form. And so if the content isn't there, then there's no way for any search engine to find it. The other possibility is that the right page uses different words. So if it didn't use the exact same words, if it didn't use the good student discount, as the words, it's not going to be found. And you might say, well, why does that happen? Why doesn't that happen when you search in Google? Well, we are going to talk about that. It's actually true that website search is actually harder than what Google does searching the whole Internet. The other problem is that the right page might exist. It might even use the correct words. But for some reason, it isn't listed in your search engine. Your search engine doesn't know that that page is on your site. Or it could be that the search engine is fine, but your ranking algorithm, the formula it uses to decide which pages come up, aren't really tuned for the content that you have on your site. Any of these things could— these questions. So maybe the content really isn't there. So here's an example of content that isn't there. So some of you might be familiar with Amtrak. And they have a train called the Acela Express that can go between Boston and Washington. It's their high-speed train. But you might not know how to spell it. And so you might spell it this way, A-X-E-L-L-A. Well, that's misspelled. It's not spelled that way. And so it kind of makes sense that that word might not be on the site. But does the search engine help you with that? Does the search engine say— Hey, has it been tuned to try and find that there might be other spellings for pages that are on there? Well, in this case it wasn't. It just said, hey, no results. And this is actually a page from a few years ago when I was doing a presentation trying to explain why website search is important. And I actually chose this page from Amtrak. And I went back right before this presentation to see, well boy, has Amtrak fixed their website search? Well, what they did is they removed their website search. And so they don't even have website search anymore. And this happens to a lot of companies that they become so frustrated with website search that they just say, you know, we're better off not even inviting people to type into that box because the results are so bad. So why is it so hard? If Google makes it look so easy when you're searching the entire web, why is it that when you're searching one little site, that it seems so much harder. It would seem to be easier. It should be easier to find the content when you are looking through less stuff. But it's actually harder. And the reason it's harder is because the exact same search technology will probably work a lot better to search the entire Internet than to search just one site. And the reason is there is so much content out there that you are far more likely to have at least one page that matches. And so you are not looking at page 17 and page 24 to see whether those search results are any good. Just looking at the top few results on the first page. And so if hundreds or sometimes thousands of companies are competing against each other to provide that perfect answer for a search result, then what happens is that you will get something good. Now, the problem is that inside your company, there's only one group that's even allowed to answer that question. So there is a group at State Farm that's allowed to put up Good student discount form. They probably work somewhere in the auto insurance customer service department, and they've got all sorts of forms that you have to fill out to get discounts. And they control all of that content. And if they didn't do a good job of picking the right words for the page, if they didn't make sure that page is stored in the search index, if they didn't put a page up that the search engine In Google, some auto insurance company is going to have done it, and so they are going to get some kind of answer there. So when you type in— when you are looking for student discounts, you will find something when you search in Google over the whole web. But if you are searching for one company site, the problem is that this one group is going to put one page up. And if there is something about that page that doesn't match the search, it's not going to be found. So here are the kinds of things that Google looks at in order to know what is the really high-quality content. So it looks at link analysis. So it looks at all sorts of links from all over the web to say, these are the good pages. It looks at social media activity. It even hires human raters who decide which pages are good and not good. It also has access to traffic information. It uses things like Google Analytics and Google Checkout to know which pages convert. Bert. It's got all sorts of information to know that something's a high-quality page. But your site search engine typically doesn't have all or even most of these quality clues. It doesn't know all of these things about the page. And so it's much harder for it to pick the right page. So you might say, hey, who cares, right? Look at Google. You can search in Google. No big deal. But here's the thing. Your search engine probably isn't any easier to use than Google's. You have your search right up there. They— the customer probably has a toolbar on their page. Or if they're using the Chrome browser, all they have to do is type it into the address box, and they can search very, very easily. So why not just do the same thing Amtrak did? Why not just forget about site search? Just let Google do it. Let them find it. Well, there's a few reasons. One of them is that if searchers search the whole web, they are likely not going to find your site. Chances are high that they are going to go somewhere else. The other thing that's possible is they might click on the paid search results instead of the organic results. And if they click on the paid search results, you might be paying to have somebody come back to your site who was already there. You've already gotten someone to come to your website. And so you want them to search in Google and maybe go away, or maybe come back and have you pay for the privilege of them coming back. The other reason is that the Google site search results might not be any better. And it's because all these same kinds of problems can bedevil Google when it's only looking at one site. And so you need to think about what are the kinds of things you need to do on your website in order to make website search really work. Because if people who come to your site search and succeed, they will buy from you. But if they can't find it, They can't buy it. And that matters not only when you are selling something online with some kind of e-commerce site, but it also matters if you are trying to get people to convert in some other way. Let's think about this. Think about how much money you spend on redesigning websites, on adjusting your information architecture and navigation. How much time and effort do you put into your homepage? If you are like most companies, these are substantial investments you make in your website. And why do you make them? Well, you make them because you are trying to help people succeed when they come to your website. You are trying to help people find what they are looking for by clicking on the right link, by seeing the right thing on the homepage, by looking at your navigation and knowing where to go. But how much time and money do you spend on your website search? How much time do you spend looking at whether the results are any good? How much time do you spend even understanding whether what people are doing is working? If you're like most companies, you spend hardly any time at all. There's some person on the IT team that's responsible to make sure that the search engine is up and running. And you probably don't spend a lot of time analyzing whether the results are any good. And in fact, You know they're not that good. You know they could be a lot better. You know that people are complaining about it. And the question is, what are you going to do about it? If you're like most companies, it's not that you don't care about your website search. It's that you're not really sure what to do. So if you ever asked yourself the question of what your bounce rate is after a site search— Mike, I'm sorry. If you had high bounce rates on your product catalog pages or on other important pages, you would say, we've got to fix that. But how many of you have even looked at what the bounce rate is after a site search? Now, part of it is understandable that you haven't looked, because it's not something— a way you've thought about before. But here's the truth. Search bounce rates are almost always higher than your bounce rates when people don't use search. Now, some of that makes sense, because if the content actually isn't there, of course they're going to end up bouncing. But even when the content is there, lots of companies don't show that content. Their site search engine can't find it. And yes, this could be a technology problem, but it could also be one of the problems we talked about earlier. The other thing you need to think about is how much money are you leaving on the table because you don't have a working site search? You have someone who's already come to your site. They already want to do business with you or else they wouldn't have come there. And they're searching for something that they truly believe is on your site. They think this question can be answered. They're not going to search for things that they think you don't have. And so even though it's possible that some of them are searching for things that you really don't have and don't want to have, most of them are searching for things that either you do have and the site search engine doesn't find, or that you don't have and you really ought to have on the site. And so your question is, after site search, how many conversions do you make? Do you know what your conversion rate is after someone does a site search? You probably know what your conversion rate is for whatever your conversion is. It could be that you have an e-commerce site, but you could have one of these other conversions that might be equally good, because you're getting people offline to be able to buy. And you probably know how well your site is converting people when they just drop on a page. But I want you to ask yourself, do you know what happens after they use site search? With most sites, the conversion rate is much lower. And just as with bounce rates, some of this is understandable, because there is a percentage of people that are searching for things that you really don't have there. And that's okay. But most people are searching for things that you do have, or searching for things that you should have. And so if you are telling those people to go away, if you are really not satisfying them, you are losing business that would have been far easier to get than attracting some new person to your site, because you've already gotten them to come here. They are already more likely to buy than someone who hasn't come yet. So if you use these kinds of metrics, and you— of search, and you can contrast that with the revenue value of all the people who don't use site search. And if what you find, which is what most companies find, is that people using search have lower revenue than people who aren't, it's usually not because for some reason those people don't buy from you. It's usually because they're not finding finding what they're looking for. That's a critical problem that would allow you to really improve your revenue if you were to fix it. So what kinds of measurements can you look at that actually identify where the problems are in site search? Well, one of them you can look at is no-result searches. So just like with the Amtrak example we showed before, here's an example from Penguin.com where if somebody is looking for the name of a book and they can't find it, well, they're not going to buy from there. They're not going to go any further in their process. And so no-result searches are a critical one to work on. Find out what the most popular no-result searches are, and work on them. No-click searches. So if you have a search, and even if it provides results, if no one's clicking on them, you're pretty sure the results are bad. And the last one we talked about already is no-conversion searches. So if people are searching, even if they're clicking on something, but they're not buying anything, that's also an issue. Walk through any site and help you with all the different areas that span everywhere from keyword research to content to help you improve your site search. And of course, if you do have a site search engine that's a problem, we can help you pick a new one as well. But there's really 2 basic ways to go after the problem, what we call the top 40 approach and the long tail approach. The top 40 approach is for the most popular popular search terms, the most popular keywords, the ones that are used the most. And for everything else, we used the long tail approach. And you might ask yourself, well, how does that split out? Well, when I worked at IBM, and I did a lot of work on optimizing IBM's site search when I was there, their 1,000 most popular queries, 1,000 most popular keywords were just 27% of all the search volume. And the average search term was only used once. So about over half of all searches were only done once in any particular month. Now you might say, well, boy, that doesn't sound like it's going to improve that much. Well, but it's the easiest way to improve is to look at those really popular search keywords and really walk through what the process is. And so what you need to do is you need to identify, well, what's the landing page for each of those keywords? Now, you might find at this point that you actually don't have the content that people are looking for. And then you can start analyzing the metrics. So analyzing whether you are getting no results for that keyword, whether you are getting no clicks, or whether you are getting no conversions. And you keep adding content, changing content, and tweaking the search engine until you are starting to get good results. And then you move on to the next popular keyword. The other thing you can do is If you're really having trouble and you can't get the site search engine to show the right content, most search engines allow you to do something that they call best bets or other kinds— they have other names for it. Basically, it means that you're hand-maintaining a search result for a particular popular query. And that can help enormously, because even if you just get those 27% of those top 1,000 keywords that IBM worked in, that made a huge difference in people thinking that your search engine was working. The other thing you can do is you can help people to drill down in search results once they've found something. So maybe they've put in a very vague query. They've put in something like this one, install DB2 UDB. And so here, look at what's on the left. They can say, oh yeah, I meant for this particular version of the product. Or I'm doing this kind of task. And so different kinds of content can use ontologies or other kinds of categories. The way you drill down in search results, it's much easier for people to see a set of search results and drill down in them than to think of a new set of keywords to type in. The other thing you can do is you can tune your search engine. So what are the ranking algorithms working? How does it do it? What factors is it using? What information do you have available that would really make it work? And are they weighted properly? And are you looking at all of the words? Are they ANDed together? Or are you looking at either/or words? Are you filtering things based on your content by country or by language? All of these things can provide much better search results. And the other thing is, if you use that faceted drill-down as we showed earlier, have you tested the names? Do people know what those names mean? All of these things are ways of tuning the search engine you already have to really make a difference. And so the other thing you want to do is once you have it working, Then you want to make sure you've got search everywhere, and that it's really easy, and that the box is big enough so that people can type enough in that they are going to get really good results. And once you've done those things, then you are going to start to see many more people using search because it's easy to use, and they are getting really good results. And so there are lots and lots of other things that we can do to help you with your site search, but these were just a few of the ideas, some of the top-level stuff that you could start working on right away. So that's all I've got, Chris. I'm sure we have some questions.
Excellent, excellent. Okay, here we go. Thanks, Mike. I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of how to fix their website search to improve sales, but you didn't answer every question. I've got several good questions from our audience teed up for you, and I'd like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask your own questions. by typing it into the question box in your GoToWebinar controls. But however, before we get to that first question, I want to tell you about a way you can get help for your team on your own website search problems. If what Mike was talking about made sense, but you still don't know where to take it for your website, check out our Biznology Jumpstart Workshops at biznology.com/training. to see all of our workshops, including the one on website search. You can get the customized training your team needs to get the business results website search your company needs. All right, we're about to start firing questions at Mike, but we need to thank our sponsors once again. So this is some filler so that you guys can answer or ask more questions, so please do. BarnRaisers, A digital marketing and social media solutions company that builds brands using community and the proven principles of relationship marketing. Brick Marketing, full-service SEO solutions company that increases website visitors. C-Sense, SaaS solutions for providing extraordinary insight and control of the digital value chain to increase digital content consumption. and accelerate online ad and subscription revenue growth at CXense.com. Marketing Pilgrim, the internet and social media marketing news blog. We cut through the bull so you don't have to. And finally, Unison, the unagency, your secret weapon in the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. Now on to your questions. Our first question is— let me see right here. All right, very cool. There are plenty. Mike, how is Google available to get content that may be seen as private to the company?
So we've been talking about website search, so it should be all public content. But when you're talking about showing content that's private, there are ways of doing things for intranet search that is private content. So you can use a search engine for your search on your intranet for just your employees or your partners. But we've been talking today about your website search, your external search for customers. The question may have been about what happens if some of that private content is actually leaking through. And that content is being shown in either Google's web search, or it's being shown in the website search. And those kinds of problems usually happen when you haven't put the right security on the content. Usually content needs to be secured behind some kind of firewall with a password or other type of security to make sure that search engines can't find it when they shouldn't. And so that's usually what the problem is. So the question could have been about intranet search, or maybe it was about those private pages leaking out into external. So I hope I answered it either way.
How can you get a searcher to succeed by using Google on your website if they have a broader scale of search?
So you can use search engine optimization techniques. And obviously Bill and I wrote a book about SEO. And there is also a Biznology Jumpstart workshop on search that we do where we can help you to make sure that your pages are coming up high in Google when people do search the entire web. But when you've already gotten someone to your website, why go back a step and hope that when they search in Google that they are going to find your website again? What you really want is to provide a website experience on your own site where people can search and they are restricted to the pages on your site. The reason people don't use those website searches as much as you would like them to is mostly because they don't work. If they worked, they'd use them. I mean, think about Amazon.com. How many times do you navigate to a book in Amazon.com? Almost never. Why? Because you've learned that their website search works really well. So you'll go to Amazon, and you'll search for a book, and you'll buy it. You wouldn't go to Amazon, look at the homepage, and say, oh geez, all right, let me search for the book in Google. You've already learned that Amazon's website search works, so you use it. The same thing can happen for your customers.
One more question. I actually had this previously on a Drupal site that I had. I forgot what the plug-in was, but when you search for something, it would send you to a page instead of search results. It would do its best job at finding the perfect page based on keyword terms. The question is, I'd like Mike's point of view on having a site result Take the user directly to a web page on the site related to the term instead of giving a search results page?
I think that that's something that you can test to see whether it works better one way or the other. You have to be really, really sure of yourself for that to be a good idea. Because if you think about it, if for some reason the exact page that you're sending them to doesn't happen to be what they're looking for, there's really no way for them to figure out what to do next except to search again. And that can be very, very frustrating. Now, I have seen companies that do bring people to that best result. And if they're absolutely certain that it works, that you can test it. You can try using A/B testing or multivariate testing, depending on whether you're trying to test different kinds of search result pages. And I've done lots of work with clients to do that kind of testing on your search results pages. And you can test whether you even need a search search results page for those searches. And you can see which ones get higher conversion rates than the other. And that would give you the answer. But in general, I'm nervous about skipping that search results page. I think that people have grown used to the idea that when they search, they're going to get a search results page. There are all sorts of ways of making sure that the page that you think is the right one is the one that's coming up at the top. But the problem is that if, for example, the person doesn't actually want that page, they want something similar to it, and it might be a little lower in the search results, you can find that out. And you can still satisfy that customer when they're searching, when you show a search results page. And it's much harder to satisfy them when you're not. And so I would be careful about removing the search results page from the interaction. I think you'd want to do some testing on that to make Absolutely sure that you're doing the right thing.
Thank you, Mike. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Thanks to Mike for these great ideas, and thanks especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. If any of you had questions that we did not have time to answer, you can email your questions to eileen@mikemorangroup.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Mike for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you a link to the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. And don't forget to check out biznology.com/training to check out our Biznology Jumpstart Workshops, including the one on website search and the one I do on digital public relations. I'll give you a sneak preview of that workshop in our next Biznology webinar, DIY Digital PR: Online Engagement and Blogger Outreach. Scheduled for 11:00 AM US Eastern Time on 9 July. Thank you very much, and have a wonderful day.
Thank you.
